That “alternative development” would be expanding the L.A. Convention Center and building a new hotel near AEG’s L.A. Live entertainment complex. I’ll let Heywood Sanders comment on whether that’s a good idea or not, but for stadium purposes, AEG has officially given up on its plan after finding nobody with an NFL team willing to give them a share of ownership in exchange for providing the stadium. Which means we now must say goodbye to one of the most cracktastic pieces of vaportecture ever:

Farewell, giant translucent shoulder pads. The world of pretend stadiums won’t be the same without you.

Apparently the Atlanta Falcons‘ new stadium is going to feature action-movie music, video boards on every available surface, dozens of places to order expensive food, and no one on the field actually playing football. This is truly the NFL’s dream future.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier and Ross say it now looks more like a Sony Discman, which is both true and also a more pleasant image for your $1 billion arena. (It’s about time for portable CD players to be retro now, right?)

The whole thing doesn’t look too bad, though unless I’m mistaken it includes a whole bunch of mid-sized buildings that don’t actually exist now, in order to make the arena look less hulking by comparison. And, as always, don’t expect that any of it will actually look like this when it’s built, assuming it gets built — though I think we can safely predict that whatever it ends up looking like, it will definitively not be a toilet seat.

Really, though, none of this matters, because these are just sketches meant as a sales pitch for businesses to locate in the project (or as the Atlanta Journal Constitution paraphrased Braves VP Derek Schiller’s explanation, “the concept of project’s look, not the final design”). The eventual development could look like this, or it could look like something else, or it could never get built. It’s important to remember that you’re looking at an ad here, even if it’s a slightly more attractive one than that fake Jack & Jones thing.

Seats made of dirt and grass! Windows you can’t see through because there are images projected on them! Some kind of neon pneumatic-tube monorail thing to whip people past the stadium at high speeds! And, for good measure, a square home plate and bases that are several feet off the foul line, because baseball’s rules are just stuck in the past, man.

SI.com is predictably breathless about all this CGI futurism, since they’re the ones who asked for it, and it would presumably be churlish to say, “We asked Populous what stadiums will look like in 16 years, and they used that as an excuse to just go take a lot of drugs and play with Photoshop.” But it had to be hard with quotes like this one:

“Technology is keeping people in their homes,” [designer Greg] Sherlock said. “We reversed that notion, and in this urban context, this park-like setting is the community living room where you go to get super technology at your fingertips.”

Even though the NFL appears to have little interest in coming to Los Angeles, AEG’s plans for a stadium are still in play, said Ted Tanner, the company’s vice president.

Addressing a Los Angeles Convention Center panel last week, Tanner presented updated renderings for Farmers Field, the proposed 78,000-seat downtown stadium, to a group of commissioners and officials.

I guess anything is possible, but given that lately more talk has focused on othersites in L.A., this seems more like a pro forma effort to keep AEG’s stadium plans alive on the back burner, at least. But why the announcement now?

The City Council in 2012 approved the stadium deal, but the AEG rights expire in October. Asked if AEG would seek to extend the contract, Tanner said it was too early to say, though others with the company say it is likely it will seek additional time.

The “final” renderings of the new Sacramento Kings arena are out, and they look to involve lots of aluminum mesh, an interior designed as a backdrop for a black-and-white minimalist comic (Adrian Tomine, maybe? Hey, he’s from Sacramento!), and hip young white people staring blankly into the sky. (What’s with the guy in the porkpie hat whose arm is permanently attached to his girlfriend?) Commenter MikeM has already dubbed it the Jiffy Pop Arena; other suggested nicknames, disparaging or otherwise, are welcome.

As far as the actual effect on seeing a basketball game goes, it’s tough to tell much from these, except that it follows the typical modern wall-of-luxury-seats-and-screw-those-people-in-the-upper-deck model that I’ve complained about at the Brooklyn Nets‘ Barclays Center. Though if everyone’s more interested in the sky, it doesn’t matter if they can see the game, right?

The New York Jets Manhattan stadium plan may be long dead, but its legacy lives on in the form of “Hudson Yards,” the mixed-use development project that was supposed to surround it on Manhattan’s West Side. Back in 2005, you will recall, Mayor Michael Bloomberg succeeded in convincing the city council that key to getting tens of thousands people to shlep several blocks west of Midtown to see football, the Olympics, or whatever, was to build an extension of the #7 subway line west of Times Square. This would cost $2 billion (if you think that’s a lot, don’t get me started on the 1,500-foot tunnel in Queens that cost $645 million), but never worry, as it would all be paid off by increased property tax payments by new development on the site — that’s right, a TIF.

The Bloomberg administration paid $234 million during fiscal year 2012 to a city-created development group that oversees the huge new commercial and residential complex, one of the mayor’s most ambitious projects.

City Hall quietly earmarked most of that money — $155 million — to the Hudson Yards Infrastructure Corp. in late June, because the group has not been generating enough revenue to pay the annual interest due on $3 billion in bonds it issued.

Of course, there are still hopes that Hudson Yards development will one day take off as originally planned — as Gonzalez wryly notes, “Maybe it will in 50 years, when most of us are dead.” If only anybody could have seen this coming.

Obviously, $1.4 billion is quite a bit more than the $200 million that the Bills were talking about for a renovation of Rich Stadium, so where would the money come from? According the the News, GBS&EC vice president George Hasiotis helpfully explained that while

it was premature to talk about financing a stadium but that based on other stadium projects across the country, it was reasonable to expect the State of New York to pay about $400 million, the NFL $200 million to $400 million. Such a project would bring in hundreds of millions for the construction trades, since 10,000 such jobs were expected to be generated, he said.

Well, yes, if you spend $1.4 billion on construction, it’d be hard not to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the construction industry. Ah, the wonders of “economic activity.”

In any event, those “reasonable” figures are likely to raise some eyebrows both in Albany and at NFL headquarters: $400 million is more than the state has kicked in for another other recent stadium project, and the NFL’s G-4 stadium fund caps out at $200 million per team. Plus, the project would apparently require an “option” on 167 acres of harborfront property owned by the state-run Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, which it’s not clear whether GBS&EC would pay for.

Still, if nothing else, Buffalo now has a stalking horse notable enough to make the newspaper, which if nothing should be enough to make $200 million for renovations look cheap by comparison. As I’ve noted many times before, half the battle for teams seeking stadiums is shifting the debate from whether to build something to how and where to build something, and by that measure, even overpriced vaportecture is an important first step.